A project to use methane produced at the city’s Point Loma sewage plant to make clean power for the University of California San Diego will break ground before the end of the year.

The project is unique because of the way it gets the gas to where it’s needed.

The plan is a change from original plans, which called for high-pressure tankers to truck the methane to La Jolla, a move opposed by some Point Loma residents.

Proponents now plan to purify the methane to San Diego Gas & Electric’s standards and put it in pipelines.

In La Jolla, UCSD will take an equivalent amount of gas out of SDG&E’s pipeline and use it as if it was made at the sewage plant — a key issue to ensure state funding.

Natural gas is 98 percent methane.

The actual gas molecules won’t make the trip up the coast, but the accounting maneuver will make it possible to make electricity and heat from greenhouse gases that are now burned.

“If we are successful, it will open a very large market to other municipalities, which are also producing methane from their wastewater treatment plants,” said Byron Washom, who oversees the university’s clean energy programs.

A financing deal was finalized this week that will get the $45 million project off the ground, said Frank Mazanec, managing director of Biofuels Energy, the Encinitas company behind the project.

That made it possible for his company to buy three fuel cells from FuelCell Energy in Connecticut to make electricity using methane from San Diego sewage plants.

“It’s really nice to be able to take an environmental problem someone has, like the Point Loma plant with their flare, and turn it into a revenue-producing, energy-generating solution,” said Andy Skok, a FuelCell executive who has been working on the project for years.

Fuel cells use a chemical process akin to a battery’s to convert the energy in a fuel into electricity and heat without burning it. They are cleaner than combustion turbines or engines, but are typically three times as expensive — $3,000 a kilowatt — as traditional power plants producing the same power.

The project is funded through private financing, bonds from a state anti-pollution agency and grants from the federal government and a state program aimed at increasing the use of alternative energy.

The subsidies make the project financially possible, Mazanec said.

“You effectively are able to put in the capital cost for electrical generation for free,” he said.

And that means that the power they make can be sold to the city and the university for less than what SDG&E charges.

The city also will get $260,000 a year from the methane it sells Biofuels Energy.

This project involves three fuel cells: a 2.8-megawatt system at UCSD, a 1.4-megawatt system at the South Bay Water Reclamation Plant in Otay Mesa and a 300-kilowatt system at the Point Loma plant itself.